Blogs, Forums, Us and Them
Via Stephen Downes I just read a post that I HIGHLY recommend to anyone trying to make sense of tools for groups and communities online. Alan Levine, who from his post may be from the blog sea, talks about the one-sided perspective of the forum dwellers, or as he calls them, the tree dwellers in Conversations: Tree People and Cave Dwellers
This post is important for at LEAST two reasons:
* Our perspectives are highly informed by our experiences. To judge a tool is to live in and with it with other, not just to tour it solo. It is the collective experiences (and they vary) that inform our perspectives.
* We still have some very interesting us/them issues between blogs and forums (and for this, see Lee LeFever's work on combining blogs and forums. In other words, this is not a binary choice as Alan points out with his mention of Teemu Arina project, which I really need to check out because it sounds like some of the fantasies I've had!)
I am doing more and more work that combines and remixes tools. What I am learning is
That's a few. I hope Lee chimes in with a post on Common Craft!
See also the technorati tag for distributed conversations.
idontknow, usthem, community_technology, technologyforcommunity, techreport
posted by Nancy White at 2:10 PM
5 Comments:
"We still have some very interesting us/them issues between blogs and forums..."
Ub nt experience, the issues tend to tilt heavily to one side.
The alpha-test audience for JournURL was made up of confirmed Forum People... old-school Compuservers. When I released the first iteration of integrated blog functionality in 2000, they didn't know what a "blog" was, but they took to it immediately.
Meanwhile, I've faced far more head-scratching and general resistance from Blog People. That's one of the reasons I hired Shelley Powers to work on my documentation... I wanted a hardcore blogger to help me describe the benefits of tightly winding a blog engine and a forum engine together, and put it in terms that bloggers grok instinctively.
"When combining blogs and forums, watch carefully for contradictory conventions between the tools, including system language (post, reply, etc.)..."
I can't count how many times I've changed and tweaked the names of buttons and links over the years, trying to find a combination of terms that makes sense from context to context.
For a long time, I was really stubborn, and completely focused on selling folks on the idea of a perfect, seamless melding of forums, blogs, and aggregation. I kept building interfaces that were objectively simple to use, but conceptually byzantine.
The latest version of the UI kind of tosses that thinking aside. If you really want to, you can still use it in Idealized Integration mode, but there's now a clearer workflow pushing you in certain directions.
Once upon a time, you clicked "create new topic" to start a discussion thread and/or post a new blog entry. A series of checkboxes on the posting form determined which one you would get. Now we're got "create discussion" and "add blog entry"... both take you to the same form as before, but the appropriate boxes are pre-checked now.
Similar things apply to categories. Before, it followed a strict forum model... you drill down into the correct topical category, then post your messsage. That's exactly the opposite of how bloggers work, so I added support for choosing the category during post composition. Either way works... it's up to the user and his background.
"Ub nt"? Non-touch typists are dangerous when we don't watch our finger placement on the ol' keyboard.
Make that "In my". How embarrassing.
(And thank you, Blogger, for giving me a chance to play guess-the-CAPTCHA over and over again!)
Using tool A for X and B for Y drives me nuts. I understand why it can be helpful and necessary but I'm always afraid community members are going to feel nervous about trying to use A for Y or "staff" members are going to feel like they need to enforce rigid guidelines between technologies. I hear that sort of rigid thinking a lot and have a hard time not being the "abrasive" one and preach my point of view til I've annoyed everyone. ;-)
Community tools are fluid! Can't we just explain what we've got, how they work and tell people to get creative and use them as they will?
Denise, your comment has me thinking. I realized I was talking inside my head at a variety of levels:
* the tool design/deployment level and the configuration choices has at that level
* the user experience level upon first entry (sense making with the tools)
and finally, the most important level, the practice of the tools in use. I agree that user invention should trump most things. But with diverse audiences, sometimes we need to find bridges to allow that invention to emerge. Make any sense?
Yes, bridges. That's what I have to find. Especially bridges that don't have too much text in English (for people whose first language isn't English). And bridges with steps and safety nets. I read this post before, Nancy, but it's only just made sense to me now when I need it. Thanks!
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home